by Nick Thorpe
The most dangerous work her parents did was to act as go-betweens for family members, some of whom would come to their house, late at night, when her parents thought the children were fast asleep. But the children knew something was afoot, and listened behind the door. ‘I remember one family telling my parents they were from Timişoara – in the west of Romania – and that their relatives had been sent to the camp for not fulfilling the quota of food they had to give to the state as peasant farmers.’ There were three layers of barbed wire fence, nine to twelve feet high around the colony. In the morning the inmates would be marched along the section of the canal they had already dug, to a point in front of where the nuclear power station is now, where they were digging through a hill. ‘The winters were particularly cold, and the wind was bitter. In the winter of 1952 two or three inmates died a day. They would bring the bodies in wooden carts, after dark, up near our house to the cemetery. We used to run along behind. The cops (she uses the Romanian slang, caraliu) would point their guns and shout at us to go away, but we followed them into the cemetery, and watched them dump a pile of bodies into a mass grave, right behind the church.’ She shows me the place, overgrown and strewn with rubbish, though the rest of the graveyard is nicely kept. We look in silence over the town. The red bridge over the canal, built at the request of the power station, contrasts with the bright green cap of the minaret. Communism could never brook dissent, least of all in the 1950s, the years of iron and steel. It was as blind a faith as that of the medieval churches, but without the figure of Christ or the hope of redemption. The camp was finally shut down in July 1953 when Stalin died, and work temporarily abandoned. Historians estimate that 100,000 people took part in the forced labour on the canal, and that at least 10,000 of them died.
From Cernavodǎ the road runs east beside the canal. Just after Poarta Albǎ a concrete column stands like a totem pole between the road and the waterway. Eleven massive concrete crosses, three on the ground, eight stacked in a child's tower above them, stand in an ‘L’ shape, with the words: ‘In memory of the martyrs’. Each cross carries the name of a prison camp: Constanța, Midia, Peninsula, Galesul, Noua Culme, Poarta Albǎ, Medgidia, Saligny, Columbia. Poarta Albǎ was the largest, with up to 12,000 inmates. In Romanian it means ‘the white gate’. A poem, written by a survivor, is carved in the concrete at the foot of the column.
Water spills, from three mouths of the Danube,
But from the fourth, blood.
Further east along the canal lies the small town of Murfatlar. The crisp, fruity white wine produced here is not the most delicious of the Romanian vintages, but is the best marketed. A huge wooden barrel on a vine-clad hill marks the entrance to the vineyards. I drive on with an altogether different goal in mind – the tenth-century cave churches of Basarabi.
Huge trucks laden with limestone form a constant thundercloud in front of the wooden scaffolding that covers a cliff face. The guardian of the cave complex, a woman with a large Alsatian dog, emerges from behind her washing lines and points me over a rickety wooden bridge. Discovered in 1957 during efforts to expand the limestone quarry next door, the caves are still not open to the public. Romania's own little Cappadocia – chapel after chapel with curious, intricate, crude shapes carved in white rock – is almost unknown. There are madonnas and saints, water-birds observed in the wetlands of the Danube, monsters and dragons, and what looks like a Viking ship, evidence of a Viking trade route from Scandinavia to Constantinople.9 To reach the chapels, you walk along wooden platforms and stairways built up against the cliff face. Even the sound of the trucks passing below fades to nothing in the inner recesses of places of worship abandoned a thousand years ago. The Romans quarried limestone blocks from here in long terraces, to build three ‘Trajan's walls’ across Dobrogea to keep out the tribes invading from the north. When the Romans left, the Christians of the Byzantine empire burrowed inwards from the terraces in the soft rock to escape their enemies, or for a little peace and quiet for their worship. They carved out naves and chapels, arches and apses, the same shapes, only smaller, as the basilicas of the early Christians.
There are also runic inscriptions, little hooked letters, carved over haloed saints. These figures are a bone of contention between Romanians and Bulgarians.10 The Romanians trace their origins to a happy marriage between the Dacians, a tribe that inhabited the Lower Danube region, and the Romans who arrived to conquer them in AD 101. The Roman emperor Trajan defeated the Dacian chief Decebal and destroyed his capital Sarmizegetusa in AD 106. The provinces of Moesia and Wallachia were annexed to the Roman empire, bringing it right down to the shores of the Black Sea. Some Classical Greek authors called the Dacians the Getae, while others believed the Getae were the easterly branch of the Dacian tribe, with the same language but different gods. Whoever they were, they adopted the language of the conquerors. When the Romans left in around AD 300 the native Romanians remained and became an integral part of the Byzantine empire, runs this particular narrative. But there are missing pieces in the puzzle. There is no story of the conversion of the Romanians to Christianity, a crucial milestone in the history of any Christian nation. There is no further trace of the Latin-based language that Romanian was to become until the twelfth century. And to make matters worse, Bulgarian linguists claim evidence of their own conversion to Christianity in these very caves.
Central to the Bulgarian argument are the Alans, a people closely associated with the proto-Bulgarians, who lived in western Ukraine and the Dobrogea region in the first centuries after Christ. Seven of the runic characters found at Murfatlar are contained in an inscription from southern Ukraine, which has been interpreted as ‘the Khan (or leader) of the Alans’. In the Basarabi caves, a man with a fine, drooping moustache, clearly dressed in a monk's habit, with a halo round his head and a large stylised cross in his left hand, is identified in the runes as Saint John the Baptist – converting the Bulgarians. Bulgarian researchers also claim to have deciphered a whole sentence at Basarabi, in the Alano-Kassogian alphabet: THE SOWING OF THE HOLY TEMPLE OF GOD WATERS AND FEEDS LIKE AN IRRIGATOR THE DRYNESS. Romanian scholars, however, say this is fanciful. ‘Only some Bulgarian scientists try to assign Runic inscriptions, as well as the entire complex, to Bulgarians, an opinion not accepted by the scientific community,’ wrote Constantin Chera. ‘The monuments in Basarabi confirm Byzantine writers Cedren and Attaleiates’ information about the existence of Romanians in the Lower Danube, as well as other, much less numerous populations, in Dobrogea.’11
In 2007, the name ‘Basarabi’ was changed back to its old Turkish name ‘Murfatlar’. This comes from the Turkish murvet, which means ‘a generous man’ – as good an etymology of a town as I have ever heard, and one likely to bring blessings of one sort or another.
After so much time in Dobrogea, I begin to worry if I will ever make progress upstream. But I should visit one last person in Medgidia before I move on. The town is a bastion of the Turkish-Tatar people and the Islamic faith in Romania. Originally a humble village called Karasu, or Black Water, it was rebuilt by the Ottomans in the mid-nineteenth century on a carefully planned grid of streets, and renamed after Sultan Abdul Medjid. The population was swollen with Muslim refugees from the Crimean War. That was how Ayhan's family, Tatars from the Crimea, reached the Dobrogea.
Ayhan is just nineteen and already an imam. He has been appointed in the village of Negru Voda, a place which, like almost every other name here, means black water in Romanian. Black permeates the landscape of Dobrogea – Black Sea, Black Forest and Black Water. I was first introduced to Ayhan by his teacher at the Turkish-Romanian high school on an earlier trip, but this time we talk alone, in a Turkish restaurant, with a Turkish soccer game on a big television screen above our heads, over a hearty lunch of long, thin Turkish pizzas, like elegant slippers. His family settled in Techirghiol, about thirty miles to the east, at the beginning of the twentieth century. He tells a story about the lake. A man called Techir was trying to get rid of his lame
donkey, and walked it into the waters of the lake (ghiol in Turkish). But then he saw that the mud of the lake healed the animal's legs. People have treasured it ever since. King Carol II of Romania even had a holiday home there, where his son Michael learnt to ride and hunt. Ayhan's father worked in the shipyards in Constanța, making ropes known as parima, with which the ships were tied to the shore. When Ayhan decided to become an imam his mother was not pleased, but he took inspiration from his paternal grandfather, who was also a man of faith. As for himself, ‘I would like to marry a Turkish or Tatar girl,’ Ayhan says. According to the 2010 census there are fifty thousand Turks and Tatars left in Romania, most of them in Dobrogea. ‘But God is great, he alone knows what will happen …’ To be a Muslim, he says, means to respect one's parents and the elders of the community, to pray five times a day, and to keep the feasts. He has no qualms about studying in Romanian schools where modern history is taught as the story of battle after battle to shake off the Turkish yoke. ‘One of my teachers nicknamed me “Ottoman”, which hurt me at first, until I got used to it.’ He feels no disadvantage from belonging to a religious and cultural minority. His dream is to study at university in Turkey. He has been there several times, and wept with joy at the beautiful way the morning prayer, the ezan, was sung in the city of Edirne. Not long before our meeting Osama Bin Laden was killed by US forces in Pakistan. Ayhan shrugs, as if I had asked him about a football team in a distant city. ‘I didn't feel anything for Bin Laden,’ he says. And he has never come across any signs of radical Islam in Romania. Nonetheless, he hopes for a revival of Islam in his own community and sees some indication of it. His maternal grandfather worked on the Danube canal in the 1970s. Once Ceauşescu visited the project, and announced that when he came again, in three months’ time, the canal should have reached a certain tree. No matter how hard the men worked, they were still far from the tree as the deadline approached. With their foreman's connivance, the tree was carefully cut down and reassembled at the point they actually had reached. Even the leaves of the tree were painted green, to please the mad dictator.
We spend one night in Medgidia, in this canal port, before returning to the river. I eat catfish in a restaurant, then find a quiet hotel, with windows that look out on to the main square, and cakes in a display case in the main entrance that you can eat, day or night. A group of young, rather rowdy, Germans is watching Germany play the Netherlands in the European Championship on the television in the common room. They're winning, and the empty bottles of Ursus, a rather drinkable Romanian beer brewed in Cluj with a bear on the label, are piling up around their ankles. ‘Germans,’ whispers the waitress, with a hint of pride in her voice because they have chosen her establishment, ‘they're with the windmills …’
At exactly the same time that Saligny and his men were building their bridge, a team of Romanian archaeologists was working just up the road from Cernavodǎ on another, very different, monument to Romanian pride: a Roman ruin. A monument, not to man's ingenuity, but to his raw power. There is no one in the little glass booth at Adamclisi to sell us tickets, but a lone guard dog, a brown-and-white-faced animal with wolf-like eyes, bounds up to greet us instead, and leads us down a cobbled avenue to what looks like a round stone fortress, a carbuncle growing on Romania's unblemished face.
The Dacians were ‘the noblest as well as the most just of all the Thracian tribes’, according to Herodotus.12 Their totem was a wolf's head, carried on their banners into battle. The strange look of the mongrel at the gate was no accident. The Romanian historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, has proposed that the name ‘Dacia’ may come from the Phrygian daos meaning ‘wolf’. Another etymology suggests the word means ‘the enemy’.
The Roman emperor Trajan marched through the Iron Gates gorge on a treacherous path carved into the sheer cliffs above the River Danube, to crush the Dacians twice, first in AD 101, then again in 106. The monument is a fat cylinder, thirty metres tall and forty metres in diameter, built to celebrate Trajan's final victory. Friezes around it – copies of the much eroded originals – depict bloody scenes from the Roman triumph: full-bearded Dacian tribesmen in leggings, trampled under the hooves of the Roman cavalry, or squewered on their lances, their own curved swords rendered useless by the superior reach of the clean-shaven invaders. The Romans shun trousers in favour of short, chain-mail skirts in the battle fashion of the second century after Christ. Above the pictures of the fighting is another row of friezes showing Dacian prisoners being led away in chains. When Sarmizegetusa fell, and Decebal committed suicide rather than face capture, the entire population was taken away into slavery, according to Roman historians. Instead of mourning such a cataclysmic defeat, the Romanians celebrate it as the ‘birth certificate’ of their nation – the marriage in the heat of battle of the Dacians and Romans. Copies were made of the original friezes in the 1970s, and the monument has a rather suspicious, socialist-realist look, as though the Roman statues on top were the prototypes of the ‘new man’ of the socialist era. Only one or two rather beautiful carvings of sheep soften the austere and violent depiction of war. There is a mound that contains the remains of four thousand Roman soldiers who fell in battle, but no record of the Dacian losses. Few traces of the Dacian language remain, but place names ending in -dava, such as Moldava, the Drava river, and possibly Plovdiv in Bulgaria, are believed to be among the last such.13
In AD 117 Trajan died and was succeeded by Trajan. In Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, published in 1951, the Roman emperor Hadrian reminisces on his deathbed.14 He describes a secret ritual performed by Roman soldiers, an initiation into the rites of the cult of the god Mithras. The cult, Yourcenar has Hadrian say, ‘won me over temporarily by the rigours of its stark asceticism, which drew taut the bowstring of the will, and by its obsession with death, blood, and iron, which elevated the routine harshness of our military lives to the level of a symbol of universal struggle’.
‘My initiation took place in a turret constructed of wood and reeds on the banks of the Danube … I remember that the weight of the bull in its death throes nearly brought down the latticed floor beneath which I lay to receive the bloody aspersion.’
‘Each of us believed that he was escaping from the narrow limits of his human state, feeling himself to be at the same time himself and his own enemy, at one with the god who seems to be both the animal victim and the human slayer. Victory and defeat were mixed like rays of the same sun.’
‘Those Dacian footsoldiers whom I crushed under my horse's hoofs, those Sarmatian cavalrymen overthrown in the close combat of later years when our rearing horses tore at each other's chests, were all struck down the more easily if I identified myself with them.’
The name of the bow, Heraclitus wrote, is life. It's work is death.15
I lie down in the long grass behind the monument, on the tomb of a Roman officer. The birds are deafening – swallows flitting above a sea of wheat and corn, pigeons perched high on Roman soldiers’ heads, and cuckoos asking questions of each other in the scrub-like trees around the column. All around are the rolling plains where Hadrian defeated his enemy. A horse and cart passes along the edge of the field, ridden like a motorbike by two teenage lads with hoods on their heads, looking neither left nor right, as though on their way to a murder.
I drive through sparse, deserted villages which feel as though they have been unpopulated since the Romans withdrew, and reach the Danube in time to watch a blood-red sun sink through vineyards among the forested islands of the river. The monastery at Dervent rears up out of the gathering gloom like the warhorse of an ally, and offers a bed for the night. Outside, an agile fellow with a long stick is dislodging fragments of swallows’ nests from the high rafters above the entrance to the church, as agitated swallows fly in all directions. I suppress a Franciscan cry of outrage. ‘We try to keep just this one area free, so that people going into or coming out of church don't get shat on,’ explains the monk with the stick. A rapid glance around the eaves of the re
st of the quadrangle confirms his story. The monastery is a city of swallows, their undisturbed nests packed into every conceivable space. The birds swarm like biblical locusts. There are so many swallows, it seems the monks themselves might be just rare, seasonal visitors.
I go into the church. A group of monks, some of almost Old Testament age, are gathered at the front, near the iconostasis. Some sing the lead, others the refrain. The older monks sing with their eyes shut. The younger men sing from an enormous old Bible, leaning earnestly over each other's shoulders to read the words. There are also one or two men in civilian clothes and younger women as well in the church, keeping a respectful distance. It is lit only by candlelight. The icons are glorious, reds and golds, silver and deep blue.
After the service I find a monk who speaks English. Father Atal is young, perhaps in his early thirties, and a little reticent. He has duties to perform, but sits down with me in a small courtyard by the wall, looking down on the silvery Danube below. There are ancient anchors beside us, a little covered pagoda, and various rocks – perhaps from the river as well, and carefully tended flower-pots. He agrees to talk on condition that it doesn't take long. And of course I can stay the night. The monastery has guest rooms. Another monk will show me to my quarters when we are finished. There is no charge, but I am welcome to make a contribution to the monastery. First I ask about the Danube. It's the right question. He gives a long sigh, then speaks about the river with a religious passion. ‘My first memory of the Danube is when my father threw me into it to learn to swim. I must have been four or five …’ He learnt his lesson, though, and has been swimming in its waters ever since. When the visitors to the monastery, with all their troubles, get too much, he takes a small rowing boat across to the island in the middle of the river, Pacuiul de Soare. The boat belongs to the archaeologists. They're excavating the Roman and Byzantine ruins on the island, and have already found the remains of a flourishing ship-building yard and a ninth-century cathedral. ‘I go to the island when I need a break. Sometimes I swim, and I enter into communion with the river. This is how I have felt since I was a child. I saw people swimming in the Danube, and realised they didn't know how to use the Danube, because the river has currents and helps you to get to the shore. Likewise in life, some people do not know how to use whatever God gives them, how to live life to the highest intensity.’
